Tossing Mullet

‘Round the LNG loop once more

By the time this hits the street, the public hearing on the permit request from TORP for a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal 64 miles south of Dauphin Island will be history.

The Governor’s decision will presumably not have been announced and that adds to the danger of trying to offer speculations about “coming events” in an op-ed column like this. And if you think you’ll get a definitive statement from me, you might as well go ahead and stuff me into the bottom of that charcoal lighting chimney thing that justifies buying the Press-Register occasionally. At least you’re not using hydrocarbon-based charcoal lighter.

The technical community is deeply divided over the issues of “open loop” technology for LNG regasification. If by chance you’ve been happily ensconced in a cave in Utah for the past five years, I’ll simply explain that LNG is transported as a super cold liquid (really, really cold at -260 degrees F) that minimizes its volume, allowing a ship to carry quite large loads – under no pressure, so it doesn’t exactly explode.

It does expand dramatically when it is somehow warmed up and returned to a gas (regasified) and pumped through lengthy pipelines to market. The warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico appeal to the industry because in what is called an “open loop” system, the liquid could be significantly warmed using just sea water. They pump in enormous volumes of water at ambient temperature and gradually warm the liquid back into a gas, then discharge the now much colder sea water back into the Gulf.

The problem is that the sea water can be full of thousands, even millions of almost microscopic sea creatures, including eggs and larvae, some of which may grow into a valued adult of great economic impact like red snapper or shrimp. In fact, a huge percentage of our marine animals, valued or not, spawn and go through early life cycle stages in the open sea because the salinity out there is similar to their internal “salinity.”

They haven’t matured enough to handle fresher water. Most believe the open loop process will kill a huge percentage of the very fragile, strange-looking critters – what the pumps themselves don’t get, the incredible cold will!

The alternative to this technology is a much simpler approach called “closed loop.” There’s obviously a lot of natural gas available because they just brought it from somewhere else, right? So use a little bit of it in some kind of burner, warm up the LNG – and Voila! – more natural gas than you know what to do with! Of course that means that you have to use some of the LNG energy that you just paid for, as well as the cost of hauling large volumes of the stuff across the ocean, burning diesel fuel all the way.

The industry always prefers to use the cheapest possible way to do anything – that’s how they make those obscene profits every quarter, which apparently enrich quite a few mutual funds that a lot of people invest in and a much, much, MUCH smaller number of already obscenely rich people that had the wisdom and money to invest with them some years ago.

The Gulf of Mexico has lots of relatively warm water and abundant pipeline infrastructure onshore. This makes it looks pretty attractive to everyone in the business. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” according to Ben Franklin and every CEO in the energy business. Actually, most of us would agree with Ben. Industry argues that the closed loop process reduces their already small profit margin (at 7 percent give or take a little) by a whopping 1percent or 2 percent. All of you who care about oil company profits today – raise your hand.

Everyone wants natural gas because it is a very efficient energy source, relatively easy to move around, doesn’t pollute the water like oil, and is even much cleaner in terms of air quality. The mainstream environmental community is in love with natural gas and has been pushing the electric companies toward it’s’ use for decades.

But the poor environmental track record of energy companies throughout the last century has literally poisoned the water or shoreline with an awful lot of people. Very few of these people benefit directly from the aforementioned profits, so the combination of factors has created a lot of animosity, some reasoned, some hysterical.

The most effective objections to the open loop process have come from the other consumers of the living resource base that would lose some unknown amount to the pumps and cold water. The best funded loyal opposition is the recreational fishermen who are not willing to give up a single fish to the process. A large percentage of them apparently have enough money that they don’t care if they have to pay a little more for their home heating or electricity. They just want to go fishing, or should I say, catching.

The commercial fishing industry have been equally vocal in their opposition and should have a broader appeal since more people eat seafood than go fishing for it. But both groups have been guilty of constantly and effectively pushing the management agencies to allow them to take more and more fish. This has brought the ocean fisheries to the sorry state that we have only come to recognize over the past 10-20 years. The living resource management agencies have had to join the side opposing open loop because the system that they are charged with maintaining is nearly moribund and may not be able to survive another “predator” out there.

There are also negative impacts from the closed loop technology that are seldom invoked in the public forum. There are air quality issues and there is a potential problem with discharge of fresh water in a system that prefers salt (see above), but most of all it might be a waste of a finite resource. No matter how much there is now – we are consuming it faster than it is being made.

Unfortunately, there is a terribly deficient data set available for either and there is no way to build a 10-year base of knowledge in a couple of years. The offshore site proposed by TORP is even less well documented than others proposed. Many scientists argue persuasively that we take the conservative approach and err on the side of caution. Others argue that it’s not fair to invoke the precautious philosophy now, when we haven’t used it before, particularly when we are so very uncertain about the consequences.

Some of the greatest advances in the world have been made buried in uncertainty but so have mistakes – take Hannibal’s elephants for example (they turned around and trampled his own men). But there is another proverb worth considering – “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” which appeared in this country in 1748 in “Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden.”

As a local rep for industry said recently,”it’s a simple matter of who gets the fish.”

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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